Sunday, June 15, 2008

Honey and mix-um up

Into the hives again. It is the end of the nectar flow in this area so I also decided to take a look all the way down in the hives to see what was going on.

Hive #2 & 3. I took one frame from hive #2 and four frames from hive #3. When I went through all the boxes I found that the bottom box in both hives were essentially empty. They had pulled comb but not much of anything in them. So in both cases I swapped boxes 1 and 2 and put the brood filled box on the bottom. I hope this makes sense, I'll check with some of the experts and see what they say.

Hive #1 has essentially mixed brood in with all of the honey. There is a lot of honey in the box but I am not willing to sacrifice the brood to get it.

Hive #4 is still a small batch of bees, they are still mostly in one medium box. If they do not start to grow I will probably need to combine this hive with one of the others at some point.

From last weeks honey run - we got 6 quarts of honey! All of this is now in cute little bears.

Dictionary

Brood Box - where the brood (the eggs, larva and young bees) are raised. Normally the bottom most box.

Checkerboarding - Interspersing empty brood comb (or even foundation) into the brood area. This is done to give the queen more room to raise brood and hopefully not swarm.

Entrance Reducer - Just a wooden stick made to fit in the entrance and make the entrance smaller. This will help keep in heat and allow the bees to guard the entrance better against bees that do not belong to the hive (robber bees).

Orientation Flight - The first trip out of the hive by young bees. They try to understand their location so they can make it back home. Also occurs when the hive is moved.